[split] What can the structural peculiarities of the VMS tell us about the nature of the underlying text

[Jorge_Stolfi]

On the "line break algorithm", if the scribe did regularly break the line rather than find a way to squeeze in a longer word

That would be the "trivial" line-breaking algorithm (TLA).  

... multiple "mechanisms" at play, not merely a line break algorithm

You mean, not just the plain TLA.  But it is pretty clear that the Scribe's line-breaking "algorithm" was more complicated than that.  

why line start word types often do not resemble the word types that the scribe failed to squeeze in (i.e. ones underperforming at Line End) [...] Altering the composition of the line start word that has been pushed from the end of the line above is not a side effect of it being shunted down:  there's a logic to longer words being demoted to the start of the next line but not for this to automatically cause their composition to be altered.

Not so.  A confirmed effect of the TLA, in any text and any language, is that the first token of each line will tend to be longer than average.   It means that the frequency of any word type at line-start will probably be different from its frequency at other places along the line.   That in turn implies that most character and n-gram statistics will be different there, too.  Because the frequency of a character or digraph in some text is largely determined by its presence or absence in the most common words in that text.

For instance, words that start with qo tend to be longer than words that don't start with qo.  That alone would cause the frequency of qo at line-start to be higher than elsewhere.

why daiin is more common at Line End

 

Earlier I claimed that TLA would also cause the last few words of each line to be shorter than average.  But I was wrong; TLA by itself has no effect on word type probabilities at line-end, only at line-start.  And it also does not, by itself, affect the word distribution of the second token of each line.

However, even the plain TLA can have such side effects if there is any correlation between the lengths of consecutive tokens.  For instance, if a certain "short" word W (like "the" in English) tends to be followed by "long" words, TLA will cause the frequency of W  to be enhanced at line-end.  

By a similar process, if there is a positive correlation between the lengths of consecutive words, the second token of a line will be longer than average, too; although not so much as the first token.  And that effect will extend to the next few tokens, but with decreasing magnitude.

why several line start word types are rarely seen in the middle of the row (we can see why they won't be at Line End but why not elsewhere?) [...] why initial d word types are more common the closer you get to Line End)

Again, the Scribe's line breaking algorithm (SLA) is definitely more complicated than the plain TLA.  There are good reasons to suspect that one of its extra features is the optional abbreviation iin -> m if it would let the Scribe squeeze one more word in.  But we don't know what other tricks it has.  

and chol is not in Herbal A despite both being similar size

Different sections are about vastly different topics.  That alone is expected to cause large differences in the frequencies of all word types -- not just "content" words but also "function" words.  And that in turn is expected to cause large differences in character and digraph statistics.  As for Herbal-A and Herbal-B, the simplest explanation is that they were sourced from two separate herbals, each with its peculiar style, vocabulary, etc.  Possibly, but not necessarily, in two different dialects.

For that reason, it is wiser to keep LAAFU investigations separate from language A/B investigations.  And to limit all statistics to one type or text (parags) from just one section, treating Herbal-A and Herbal-B as separate sections.

why the line start word appears to be impacted in many cases by the word above it

Indeed, this is not an expected consequence of TLA by itself.  But there may be other explanations that do not imply LAAFU.

As noted above, even plain TLA should cause qo-words to be more common at line-start than elsewhere.   But now suppose that the grammar and/or the nature of the paragraphs is such that there cannot be more than one qo-word per sentence (or that the qo-words will tend to cluster together), and the average sentence length is 20 words.  Since a full-width line has about 10 words, these hypothetical facts together would largely prevent two consecutive lines from starting with qo.  

And note also that Herbal has many parags with narrower rails,  where this possible explanation would work even better.

In particular, it's interesting that line-start words contain bigrams (like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) that are quite rare elsewhere. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was that "there could be a process which adds [y, d] to words beginning [ch, sh] when they are in a line-start position".

I recently proposed such a hypothetical mechanism somewhere. Suppose that the language has semantic tones (like Mandarin) or semantic pitch (like Swedish), and [aoy] denote pitch levels low-mid-high.  If a word ends with y pitch and the next one starts with y pitch, there would be no need to write the y twice.  Thus the Scribe may have been told that, in such cases, he can omit the second y.  Unless there is a line break, in which case the second y should be written to help the reader.

All the best, --stolfi